Tag: Longannet

“How is waste in my area?” – a regional dashboard

Ash on

Introduction

Our aim in this piece of work is:

to surface facts of interest (maximums, minimums, trends, etc.) about waste in an area, to non-experts.

Towards that aim, we have built a prototype regional dashboard which is directly powered by our ‘easier datasets’ about waste.

The prototype is a webapp and it can be accessed here.

our prototype regional dashboard

Curiosities

Even this early prototype manages to surface some curiosities [1] …​

Inverclyde

Inverclyde is doing well.

Inverclyde’s household waste positions Inverclyde’s household waste generation Inverclyde’s household waste CO2e

In the latest data (2019), it generates the fewest tonnes of household waste (per citizen) of any of the council areas. And its same 1st position for CO2e indicates the close relation between the amount of waste generated and its carbon impact.

…​But why is Inverclyde doing so well?

Highland

Highland isn’t doing so well.

Highland’s household waste positions Highland’s household waste generation Highland’s household waste % recycled

In the latest data (2019), it generates the most (except for Argyll & Bute) tonnes of household waste (per citizen) of any of the council areas. And it has the worst trend for percentage recycled.

…​Why is Highland’s percentage recycled been getting worse since 2014?

Fife

Fife has the best trend for household waste generation. That said, it still has been generating an above the average amount of waste per citizen.

Fife’s household waste positions Fife’s household waste generation

The graphs for Fife business waste show that there was an acute reduction in combustion wastes in 2016.

Fife’s business waste

We investigated this anomaly before and discovered that it was caused by the closure of Fife’s coal fired power station (Longannet) on 24th March 2016.

Angus

In the latest two years of data (2018 & 2019), Angus has noticibly reduced the amount of household waste that it landfills.

Angus' household waste management

During the same period, Angus has increased the amount household waste that it processes as ‘other diversion’.

…​What underlies that difference in Angus’ waste processing?

Technologies

This prototype is built as a ‘static’ website with all content-dynamics occurring in the browser. This makes it simple and cheap to host, but results in heavier, more complex web pages.

  • The clickable map is implemented on Leaflet – with Open Street Map map tiles.
  • The charts are constructed using Vega-lite.
  • The content-dynamics are coded in ClojureScript – with Hiccup for HTML, and Reagent for events.
  • The website is hosted on GitHub.

Ideas for evolving this prototype

  1. Provide more qualitative information. This version is quite quantitative because, well, that is nature of the datasets that currently underlay it. So there’s a danger of straying into the “managment by KPI” approach when we should be supporting the “management by understanding” approach.
  2. Include more localised information, e.g. about an area’s re-use shops, or bin collection statistics.
  3. Support deeper dives, e.g. so that users can click on a CO2e trend to navigate to a choropleth map for CO2e.
  4. Allow users to download any of the displayed charts as (CSV) data or as (PNG) images.
  5. Enhance the support of comparisons by allowing users to multi-select regions and overlay their charts.
  6. Allow users to choose from a menu, what chart/data tiles to place on the page.
  7. Provide a what-if? tool. “What if every region reduced by 10% their landfilling of waste material xyz?” – where the tool has a good enough waste model to enable it to compute what-if? outcomes.
1. One of the original sources of data has been off-line due to a cyberattack so, at the time of writing, it has not been possible to double-check all figures from our prototype against original sources.

How I chanced on Longannet in the data

Ash on
I’ve added a “Household vs business waste” time-series to our map-oriented webapp from last week. The business data was parsed from SEPA’s Business Waste Data Tables.

When I watched the waste amounts change through time on this map, Fife’s amounts really stood out…​

Household vs business waste, thru time

Fife was generating so much more waste from business, than the other council areas. But why?

To look at the data in more detail, I loaded it into the data grid & graph tool that we built a couple of months ago.

First, I filtered the data grid to show me: Fife’s four largest, business wastes vs their averages link.

Fife’s four largest, business wastes vs their averages

Fife’s combustion waste stands out from the average.

Secondly, I filtered the data grid to show me: the business combustion waste quantities by sector link.

Business combustion wastes by sector

Unfortunately this data isn’t broken down by council area, but it clearly shows that most of the combustion wastes are generated by the power industry.

An internet search with this information – i.e. “Fife combustion power” – returns a page full of references to Longannet – the coal fuelled power station.

Longannet power station (courtesy of Scottish Power)

According to Wikipedia, Longannet power station was the 21st most polluting in Europe when it closed, so no wonder that its signature in the data is so obvious! It was closed on 24th March 2016, which correlates with the sharp return towards the average in 2016, of the combustion wastes graph line for Fife.

Of course this isn’t a real discovery – SEPA, Scottish Power and the people who lived around the power station will be very familiar with this data anomaly and its cause. But I think that its mildly interesting that a data lay person like me could discover this from looking at these simple data visualisations.